17.3.16

THE WHO – Focusing On Nowhere, Investigating Miles

This photograph of
yours truly with Ian McLagan and Kenney Jones, taken is Los Angeles in 1973, appeared
on my Facebook page last weekend and came from a bulging green envelope folder
that was named ‘Who Bio Etc’ that I found at the bottom of a pile of old Q
magazines
underneath our staircase. It also contained piles of Who documents that date from
1981 when I was researching my book The Who: The Illustrated Biography, published by Omnibus Press in 1982,
and my book on Pete Townshend that came out a couple of years later. In view of
the high standard of many subsequent Who-related books, both seem rather slight
nowadays but at the time I was quite proud of them.

So I scanned some of the
documents in the folder to post on Just Backdated with a few notes about each
item.

When I wrote those books
I asked Pete for his help. It was, of course, during the period when he ran his
own book publishing company, Eel Pie Books, so the request was a bit of a long
shot as I was writing for a rival company. Nevertheless Pete took the
trouble to reply, gracefully, as the letter below indicates, and even cc’d the
letter to his mum and dad in case I went snooping around their house in Ealing.
Heaven forbid! Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure nine out of ten rock stars would
have thrown my letter in the bin.

Denied access to the source I did
what all researchers do and went to the Public Records office, in those days at
Somerset House at Aldwych where records of British births, marriages and death
are kept. Over the course of several days I painstakingly looked up such
documents as I could find that related to the Townshend family. I found Pete’s
birth certificate, his mum and dad’s wedding certificate and the wedding certificates
of both of his grandfathers, Horace Townshend and Maurice Dennis, respectively a
fishmonger and a ‘tailor’s butter’, whatever that is. Happily all of these
documents were in my Who folder and they are below.

All the information I gleaned from these
documents enabled me to flesh out the opening chapter in my biography of Pete.
There was no internet in those days but I somehow discovered that Horace
Townshend, whom Pete refers to as Horry in his book Who I Am, was a semi-pro musician and
composer who with his wife Dorothy (Dot) performed at music halls and at
seaside parks in the 1920s, sometimes with the Jack Shepherd Concert Party. A
bit of asking around led me to an expert on Music Hall, a very old bloke who
lived in a small flat in Bayswater that was chock full of Music Hall
memorabilia, and in a book he showed me there was a picture of the Jack
Shepherd Concert Party on stage in Brighton. Unfortunately he was reluctant to
lend me the book so I couldn’t include the picture in my own book, not that I
knew for sure that Horry and Dot were in the picture anyway. But – surprise,
surprise – it’s on the internet now, and I’ve reproduced it below. My Music
Hall expert did vaguely recall Pete’s paternal grandparents when I mentioned
their names and they might just might be on this stage. Even if they aren’t
this is the sort of event that Pete’s granddad and granny would have appeared
at – a bit different from smashing guitars at the Marquee Club I know, but
everything starts somewhere.

Wow. Pete Townshend's parents literally lived two houses up from me when they got married. Mind completely blown. Been a Who fan all my life and now found this gem! Thank you so much, as always, Mr Charlesworth!